'Thomas Paine and the Promise of America': Founding Father of the American Left

WHAT we might call the Founders' Surge keeps rolling along. Harvey J. Kaye's "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America" is the newest entry in the founders' sweepstakes, making a spirited argument that Paine merits a place on the Mall or Tidal Basin as the only authentically radical voice, the only unblinkered democrat, the only patriotic prophet whose vision remains relevant and resonant for our time.

If the criteria were exclusively journalistic, Paine's status would be assured. In 1774 this working-class unknown from London, uneducated and a former corset maker, arrived in Philadelphia. Less than two years later he did what every American journalist since then has dreamed of doing: changing the course of history with a piece of writing. His "Common Sense" (1776) galvanized popular opinion around the idea that American independence was not impossible, but indeed inevitable.

Several months later he became America's first embedded journalist, accompanying the tattered remnants of the Continental Army as it fled across New Jersey after a devastating defeat in New York. In retrospect, this was the most vulnerable moment the American republic ever faced, the greatest threat to what we now call national security. In this all-consuming context, Paine wrote the defiantly reassuring words that would echo through the ages: "These are the times that try men's souls." Long before Edward R. Murrow could tingle spines during World War II with "This is London," Paine had already set the standard against which all subsequent American journalists would be measured.

Kaye's core argument, however, goes far beyond the claim that Paine was a great journalist. Writing with the passion of a defense attorney whose client has been wrongfully sentenced to obscurity by what he calls a plutocratic phalanx of "the powerful, propertied, prestigious and pious," Kaye contends that Paine, alone among the founding generation, saw to the very heart of the American promise embodied in the principles of 1776. Even more than Thomas Jefferson, whose revolutionary vision was blurred by the stigma of slavery, Paine was a cleareyed radical.

The key document here is not "Common Sense" but "The Rights of Man" (1791-92), which advocated that both France and America embrace the full implications of their respective revolutions: the end of slavery; equality for women; abolition of all property requirements to vote; complete separation of church and state; global peace enforced by an international confederation of republican governments. In other words, Paine was a radical visionary because he insisted on the immediate adoption of the liberal agenda destined to triumph, though quite gradually, over the next two centuries.

Ironically, the very feature of Paine's mentality that Kaye most admires -- its radicalism -- is precisely the feature his most ardent critics at the time found most troubling. Kaye, the author and editor of several books, including "Are We Good Citizens?," tends to label Paine's enemies elitists, wealthy aristocrats deaf to the authentically egalitarian ethos of his working-class politics. But this quasi-Marxist gloss obscures the fundamental ideological difference between Paine and most of the other founders. John Adams, for example, who was the son of a shoemaker, loathed Paine. Adams regarded the effort to implement the full revolutionary agenda immediately as a path leading over the cliffs of Dover.

What separated Paine and Adams was not class so much as a classic disagreement over how to manage and secure a revolution. Adams believed in gradual change, in an evolutionary revolution. Paine believed that the revolutionary agenda, "the spirit of '76," did not need to be managed, only declared. Adams regarded the Revolution as the Big Bang in the American political universe, which should radiate its radical energies and implications only slowly into the future. The Paine approach was, in fact, the more radical course followed by the French Revolution. It ended up, as Adams predicted, in barrels of blood and Napoleonic despotism. Paine himself nearly perished in the process he had helped to start, saved from the guillotine only when a prison guard neglected to remove him from his cell on the day of executions. Perhaps this is the reason one scholar named Paine the "Peter Pan of the Age of Reason."

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The second half of "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America" is a brisk walk through the corridors of time in quest of Paine's legacy. Though a self-confessed partisan, Kaye provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of Paine's controversial reputation, and the results congeal into three categories: first, the Paine haters, like Theodore Roosevelt, who called him a "filthy little atheist" because of "The Age of Reason" (1794-95), a frontal assault on Christianity; second, prominent American statesmen and authors like Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who quoted selectively from Paine but only to serve their own political purposes; third, the longer list of radicals, a kind of roll call of the American left, who drew inspiration from Paine's uncompromising convictions. A selection from the last, in rough chronological order, includes Robert Owen, William Lloyd Garrison, Victoria Woodhull, Henry George, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Henry Wallace, Saul Alinsky, C. Wright Mills, Tom Hayden and Bob Dylan.

Oddly enough, however, over the past 30 years Paine's chief fans have appeared within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, making Paine, like Jefferson, the proverbial man for all seasons. Though weird, and surely not the legacy Kaye has in mind, the Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich persuasion has a plausible claim on the libertarian side of the Paine legacy, which is deeply suspicious of all forms of consolidated political power and views government as "them" rather than "us." Paul Wolfowitz would also be able to cite Paine in support of George W. Bush's Iraq policy, since Paine believed that democratic values were both universal and self-enacting. History makes strange bedfellows.

WHICH is to say that "the promise of America" that Paine glimpsed so lyrically at the start cannot be easily translated into our 21st-century idiom without distorting the intellectual integrity of its 18th-century origins. Paine, like Jefferson, was a product of the Enlightenment who sincerely believed there was a natural order of perfect freedom and equality that had been hijacked by medieval kings and priests. If only, as Diderot put it, the last king could be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, the natural order would be restored, naturally. Marx's later formulation of the same illusion was that the state would wither away, leaving a harmonious and classless society. In the wake of Darwin's depiction of nature, Freud's depiction of human nature, the senseless slaughter of World War I and the genocidal tragedies of the 20th century, Paine's optimistic assumptions appear naïve in the extreme.

What a reincarnated Paine would say about our altered political and intellectual landscape is impossible to know. Kaye hears his voice more clearly and unambiguously than I do, a clarity of conviction that I envy. My more muddled position is that bringing Paine's words and ideas into our world is like trying to plant cut flowers.

Joseph J. Ellis is the author, most recently, of "His Excellency: George Washington."